Coming Clean

Original Sin, Part II: Wounds and Hobbling

The move from the Garden to “the world” is a fundamental change in mankind. In the Garden, man was in communion with God, endowed with original justice and innocence. In the world, all of this is gone. What does this mean?

It means that, through no fault – no sin – of our own, we are born injured and estranged from God because we are all born “in the world” and not “in the Garden”. Adam’s transgression is the curse of all mankind – that all mankind should suffer the separation he willfully placed between him and God. This is what is meant when it is said we are born into Original Sin.

Augustine writes in On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism of Infants (Book III)

As, therefore, by the answer of those, through whose agency they are born again, the Spirit of righteousness transfers to them that faith which, of their own will, they could not yet have; so the sinful flesh of those, through whose agency they are born, transfers to them that injury, which they have not yet contracted in their own life. And even as the Spirit of life regenerates them in Christ as believers, so also the body of death had generated them in Adam as sinners.

We all understand Adam’s sin – it’s something he willfully did. He is at fault. Under Original Sin, the Roman Catholic Church and Augustine both teach, we inherit the injury of Adam’s sin, but we are not held as properly responsible for Adam’s sin. It’s kind of like Adam willfully giving himself a black-eye and breaking a leg when God told him not to, and now, because of Adam’s choice, we’re all born with black-eyes and broken legs. It’s not our fault that we have a black-eye and broken leg – we didn’t punch our eye and strike our leg – but here we are all the same.

The fact that we are injured is important because, using the above analogy, with a black-eye and a broken leg, we’re not going to be able to see well and we’re not going to be able to walk right. As a matter of fact, if we think we can see perfectly well and walk perfectly right, then odds are we’re just going to make the situation a whole lot worse, resulting in a misery and suffering life. Same goes it with our moral life. We are born morally injured – separated from God – and so cannot live perfectly morally well until we are healed.

Original Sin does not say that our ability to see, to walk, to behave morally is totally gone or absolutely ruined. Original Sin only says that we are flawed which leaves room and has been interpretted to mean that mankind can by his own will get things right while getting other things wrong. People can see both in others and in themselves that they are injured, and so they can adjust for that. To use our analogy, if I know my leg is broken, then I can stay off of it … or use it such that I will not cause myself more harm. Likewise, we all know our personality faults … we can exercise our will to avoid invoking those flaws or situations that would encourage such bad behavior. This is moral living … a poor moral living, yet a moral living all the same.

God can and does see good works by fallen man for what they are and reckons them as such, but these good things don’t restore communion – that takes an act of God, that takes grace. Furthermore, God does not want people hobbling on one good leg all their life, avoiding the further injury of the second. God wants man walking on two good legs, and He offers to heal our injuries, to tend to our wounds.

It is for this reason, this desire and plan of God, that people can live a moral life and still be condemned to hell: if you don’t accept God’s healing invitation – His grace to let you walk on two legs – then you’re not the kind of man He wants, the kind of man He has intended you to be.

Original Sin eliminates the ability for man to rise above it all without God’s grace – thus leaving him “evil” and a “sinner” from the earliest of his days, in a universal sense, even though no formal act of immorality may be present. It does not matter how well a man tends his wounds, he cannot properly heal them to the perfection that God had created and intends for us to have. And that is all that matters. That’s what makes Jesus desperately needed.

Next to come, where Protestants add to this theology.